Introduction to the Python Interpreter, Part 4: It's Dynamic!

This is Part 4 in a series on the Python interpreter. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. If you’re enjoying this series, consider applying to Hacker School, where I work as a facilitator.

One of the things I was confused about when I started digging into python internals was how python could be “dynamic” if it was also “compiled.” Often, in casual coversation, those two words are used as antonyms – there are “dynamic languages,”1 like Python, Ruby, and Javascript, and “compiled languages,” like C, Java, and Haskell.

Most of the time, when people talk about a “compiled” language, they mean one that compiles down to native x86/ARM/etc instructions2 – instructions for an actual machine made of metal. An “interpreted” language either doesn’t have any compilation at all3, or compiles to an intermediate representation, like bytecode. Bytecode is instructions for a virtual machine, not a piece of hardware. Python falls into this latter category: the Python compiler’s job is to generate bytecode for the Python interpreter.4

The Python interpreter’s job is to make sense of the bytecode via the virtual machine, which turns out to be a lot of work. We’ll dig in to the virtual machine in Part 5.

So far our discussion of compiling versus interpretation has been abstract. These ideas become more clear with an example.

Here’s a function, its bytecode, and its bytecode run through the disassembler. By the time we get the prompt back after the function definition, the modulus function has been compiled and a code object generated. That code object will never be modified.

This seems pretty easy to reason about. Unsurprisingly, typing a modulus (%) causes the compiler to emit the instruction BINARY_MODULO. It looks like this function will be useful if we need to calculate a remainder.

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>>>modulus(15,4)3

So far, so good. But what if we don’t pass it numbers?

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>>>modulus("hello %s","world")'hello world'

Uh-oh, what happened there? You’ve probably seen this before, but it usually looks like this:

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>>>print"hello %s"%"world"helloworld

Somehow, when BINARY_MODULO is faced with two strings, it does string interpolation instead of taking a remainder. This situation is a great example of dynamic typing. When the compiler built our code object for modulus, it had no idea whether x and y would be strings, numbers, or something else entirely. It just emitted some instructions: load one name, load another, BINARY_MODULO the two objects, and return the result. It’s the interpreter’s job to figure out what BINARY_MODULO actually means.

I’d like to reflect on the depth of our ignorance for a moment. Our function modulus can calculate remainders, or it can do string formatting … what else? If we define a custom object that responds to __mod__, then we can do anything.

The same function modulus, with the same bytecode, has wildly different effects when passed different kinds of objects. It’s also possible for modulus to raise an error – for example, a TypeError if we called it on objects that didn’t implement __mod__. Heck, we could even write a custom object that raises a SystemExit when __mod__ is invoked. Our __mod__ function could have written to a file, or changed a global variable, or deleted another attribute of the object. We have near-total freedom.

This ignorance is one of the reasons that it’s hard to optimize Python: you don’t know when you’re compiling the code object and generating the bytecode what it’s going to end up doing. The compiler has no idea what’s going to happen. As Russell Power and Alex Rubinsteyn wrote in “How fast can we make interpreted Python?”, “In the general absence of type information, almost every instruction must be treated as INVOKE_ARBITRARY_METHOD.”

While a general definition of “compiling” and “interpreting” can be difficult to nail down, in the context of Python it’s fairly straightforward. Compiling is generating the code objects, including the bytecode. Interpreting is making sense of the bytecode in order to actually make things happen. One of the ways in which Python is “dynamic” is that the same bytecode doesn’t always have the same effect. More generally, in Python the compiler does relatively little work, and the intrepreter relatively more.